Got any barbeque sauce?
September 28, 2005
It will probably be decades before President George W. Bush’s mark on history will be clear, or at least disinterestedly argued, but one straw in the wind may be this week’s column by Peggy Noonan.
George W. Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce? The great Bush spending spree is about an arguably shrewd but ultimately unhelpful reading of history, domestic politics, Iraq and, I believe, vanity.
Noonan, one of President Reagan’s speech writers, usually has something worth reading about the passing scene. Here she argues that big spending on the part of this Republican administration is not simple-minded throwing money at problems, but the result of a calculated misreading of, as she puts it in the above quote, history, domestic politics, Iraq, and vanity.
Very interesting. Take Noonan’s thesis, add a pinch of gold dust (The Mogambo Guru), stir in a cup of libertarian economics (Arnold Kling), brush it with a bit of biblical eschatology, and you get a brew of utter despair for the inspiration of future generations. Now that the Europeans and Americans have botched up the “good life,” is it time to pass the torch to the Asians?
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we humans are a pretty adaptable bunch and will somehow survive the machinations of even the worst bunch of bureaucrats and politicians, and ours are not (yet) the worst that western society has known.
In spite of them we will continue to love, to quarrel, to marry, to beget, to scratch out our living as best we know how - just like our ancestors have always done. For most of us, at the level of our daily lives there is no reason to despair, especially as we ponder God’s redemptive history spanning many millennia.
Dave, feeling better, now.
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5 Responses to “Got any barbeque sauce?”
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A straw in the wind indeed! I conceived a dslike of Noonan back in her Reagan days, but this piece makes me want to look up some of her others.
Some good wisdom here, Dad!
Sometimes I think that perhaps politics has been, is, and will always be pretty much a mess.
But is there such a thing as a necessary mess?
Could be, at least in free countries. Perhaps it’s better than the alternative.
Yes, in any case. But it leaves one to only hope that by some chance good and honest people will somehow get elected and help us through our problems.
Yep. Know any?